African American Religious Research Articles

"We Have a Right to Live in This Country": Reverend Moses Broyles and the Struggle for Social Justice and Racial Equality in Nineteenth-Century Indiana

ABSTRACT: Rev. Moses Broyles (1826–1882) ranks as a leading figure in Indiana's African American religious, political, racial, educational, and legal history. Born a slave in Maryland, he was sold as a child to John Broyles of Paducah, Kentucky, from whom he purchased his freedom in 1854. Thence he moved to Lancaster, Indiana, where he enrolled at the Eleutherian Institute. In 1857, he relocated to Indianapolis and joined the Second Baptist Church. Recognizing his oratorical skills and spiritual leadership, its members soon called Broyles as their pastor. As a bi-vocational minister, Rev. Broyles also taught at a private school for African American children and helped integrate Indianapolis High School. He was a fierce opponent of slavery who demanded equal rights and privileges for African Americans as U.S. citizens. Later, he served as a statewide leader in the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant even as he challenged Indiana's anti-Black laws.

“There Is No God in Heaven”: Black Religion, Resistance, and the Police Power in Jim Crow New Orleans

In late October 1907, members of an African American religious order called the Council of God killed a White police officer outside their house of worship in New Orleans. This article recovers and analyzes the radical theology of the Council of God, situating it in the vibrant intellectual world of turn-of-the-century Black spirituality. The Council of God’s belief system was structured around resistance to white supremacy in general and resistance to police violence in particular. If the violence of Jim Crow policing shaped the Council of God’s theology, however, the reverse was equally true, as the New Orleans Police Department consistently used the specter of Black religious radicalism to call for increased funding and popular support. This article probes the relationship between religion, race, violence, and policing, offering new perspectives on the police power, Black religion, and African American armed self-defense in the era of Jim Crow.

Response: Remaining Committed to Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT Framed in the mode of an interview, this essay responds to questions surrounding the publication of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) in light of contemporary moves in Black studies, including Black religion and culture studies. The contemporary relevancy of the form of religious and cultural criticism presented in the book is the topic of the dialogue among contributors. My postmodern iconoclastic critique of Black essentialism—cultural, racial, or heroic—in favor of a grotesque aesthetic, which accents the comedic interplay of unresolved ambiguity and a Nietzschean robust pessimism filled with laughter, is rearticulated in light of the 21st century challenges and provocations of the religious situation discussed by the guest co-editors and contributors. Readers will discover a generous generational dialogue that models a commendable Black scholarly aesthetic.

A Black Feminist Study of Religion: Inheriting Victor Anderson’s Black Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline what Kristie Dotson refers to as an “inheritance map” for the epistemological insights and critical moves in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995). I establish that Beyond Ontological Blackness represents what Stuart Hall calls a significant break – “where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes” 1 1 Hall, “Cultural Studies." – and thusly, a new direction in the study of black 2 2 In my current writing projects (post 2019) I use Black (rather than black) and white for political reasons. Full stop. I deploy a “b” when engaging oppression, however. Still, making distinctions in this essay between what should have a “B” (for example, Black women, church, students, presence, subject, religion, experience, etc.) and what should have a “b” (for example, antiblack, ontological blackness, symbolic blackness, black heroic cultural genius, black crisis, etc.) proved extremely difficult. Most challenging was turning my powerful “B” into a “b” throughout for clarity and consistency. religion and theology 3 3 This is not slippage. I distinguish between black theology and the study of black religion at length in Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). : black religion and culture studies. The latter of which makes room for a black feminist study of religion.

BOB’s Blues: A Reflection on the Legacy of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness

ABSTRACT This essay celebrates Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (BOB) by considering how it reads blackness as an open possibility for human flourishing. Through critical engagement with Anderson’s notion of the “grotesquery of blackness,” it reads blues as a site for considering the implications of Anderson’s contention that black theology must move beyond essentialist constructions of blackness. The reflection also highlights how Anderson’s work anticipates contemporary critiques of modernity within decolonial studies, especially in the work of Sylvia Wynter. Finally, this essay uses the insights of BOB to assess the grotesque genius of the blues by offering a brief analysis of blues singer Muddy Waters’s performance of “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Usage of the Concepts of Children of God and imago Dei as a Theological Foundation of Equality, Human Dignity and Human Rights

Abstract Martin Luther King, Jr. employs different theological concepts to substantiate equality and dignity of all human beings. Among these, the metaphors “children of God” and “image of God” feature prominently. While the children of God-concept is used widely in the African American religious and theological tradition, the occurrences of imago Dei are rather scarce in the generation of King and his teachers. This article reconstructs the usage of the concept of children of God – which is used in the New Testament context and thus often in orthodox Protestantism exclusively – as an inclusive universal anthropological concept in the Black religious tradition and its reception as well as adaptation in King’s own work. With regard to the theologoumenon of image of God, we will see that King starts to apply it differently beginning in the early 1960s, now explicitly using it as a foundation of human dignity and worth, and respectively, human rights. In many interpretations of King’s writings, it is overlooked that the usage of the imago Dei-concept was not at all common at this time. Sometimes the metaphor is retrojected in parts of King’s work, where it is not employed as a foundation of dignity. It is also not totally clear why King alters his theological argument at this time, but it is very likely that it is related to his exchange with George Kelsey and Abraham Heschel, who both employ the term as the basis for equality and dignity during this period. This development in King’s theology is an important step forward since in mainstream Protestant theology this development does not take place until one or two decades later.

Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Brett Grainger Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century. By Vaughn A. Booker. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $35.00. Scholarly narratives on African American religion have long centered on the Black church and its predecessor, "slave religion" (what Albert Raboteau called the "invisible institution"). In both cases, Protestant influences, themes, and institutional forms have dominated discussion. In recent decades, however, scholarship has widened to encompass non-Protestant and post-Protestant modes of religiosity, including Afro-Catholicism, Black Islam, and Afro-Diasporic traditions. Taken together, these developments have decentered the "Black [End Page 78] church" in American religious history by questioning its monopoly over African American religious and cultural life. Vaughn Booker's new work returns our attention to mainstream denominations and church life, but for a different purpose: to show the ways in which twentieth-century jazz musicians leveraged their celebrity to become "race representatives"—ambassadors of Black respectability to the white world—alongside religious leaders, advancing social and cultural progress for other African Americans and helping to transform the reputation of jazz from the devil's music to high art. Drawing upon a rich archive of popular materials—interviews and articles in the Black and white press, private writings, and a number of other sources—Booker demonstrates how jazz musicians embodied beliefs and practices that both mirrored and diverged from those of the Black church. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Representations of Religion and Race," describes how, early on, middle-class Black ministers worked to resist the rising popularity of jazz among their younger congregants. Their efforts failed, but with an ironic result: as the press held up jazz men and women as spokespersons for their race, these same artists came to see themselves as burdened with the responsibility of representation, turning the stage into a kind of pulpit. Booker focuses on three ways in which jazz artists performed religion for the public: through their "irreverent performances of African American religious leadership and expressive acts of worship," their "commitment to black Protestants' social and political activism against Jim Crow," and their "sacralization of 'Africa' in narratives of African American history" (13). If the second theme might come as less of a surprise to readers, the first and third themes are less well documented, and Vaughn presents them in especially striking and memorable ways. In chapter two, which focuses on Cab Calloway, Booker surprises and delights by situating the multitalented singer and bandleader within a long tradition of "religious irreverence." Chapter 4, "Royal Ancestry," moves from irreverence to reverence, showing how the "sacred concerts" of Duke Ellington, among other explicitly religious jazz works, presented an African American history "emerging from, and connected to, a sacred African past that included both biblical scriptures and ancient African civilizations," a story that effectively rendered "the enslaved African experience in the United State … as an extension of that sacred African history" (16). In Part II, "Missions and Legacies," Booker foregrounds the religious thought and practice of two pianists and composers, Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams. Booker attends to the ways Ellington struggled to articulate his theological beliefs as he navigated a variety [End Page 79] of religious settings, revealing how his sacred concerts were conceived less as an authentic recapitulation of the Black Protestant traditions of his childhood than an ecumenical religious project directed to an explicitly white liberal Protestant audience. Roman Catholicism receives the most sustained attention in the two chapters devoted to Williams, who Josef Sorett has described as the most famous Afro-Catholic convert of the post-war era, a period that saw a massive increase in African American affiliation with Catholicism. The seventh chapter explores Williams's religious journey to the Catholic faith. Booker ably narrates how Williams's loss of her friend, bebop pioneer Charlie ("Bird") Parker, to a heroin overdose contributed to her decision to convert and how Williams struggled with whether to give up music entirely until a number of friends, including several jazz-loving clergy, convinced her to use...

«Созерцавший Агнца Божия»: Джупитер Хэммон – первый чернокожий христианский поэт Америки

The role of Christianity as a factor that exerted a decisive influence over African American social and cultural history, is being debated time and again in the course of African American studies. The ambivalent attitude of the 18th –19th century Christian preachers and missionaries to slavery, egalitarian tendencies that combined with the idea of humility and resignation, led to contradictions and controversy in the evaluation of the role Christianity played in Afroamerica. The case of Jupiter Hammon (1711 –1806?), a preacher and the first Black Christian poet in America, illustrates the emergence of the basic topoi in the pre-war Blackamerican literary tradition: conversion to Christianity and literacy (enculturation) as two essential conditions for the acknowledgement of Black humanity and ability to integrate into the New World civilization. Jupiter Hammon refused to struggle against slavery; paradoxically, however, his work is an inherent part of both African American religious and cultural history and the New England Christian thought, that engendered Abolitionism and its most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), based on the concept of the “religious genius” of the African and the “Black redemption” of the greatest American vice, slavery.

Telehealth in a Washington, DC African American Religious Community at the Onset of COVID-19: Showcasing a Virtual Health Ministry Project

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic, with its disproportionate health and social-economic effects on the African American community, mandates bold new models to ensure that vulnerable communities receive maximum support and services. This article highlights a social work practice innovation model adapted from a traditional social work casework model. A group of multidisciplinary leaders strategized about ways to meet the needs of older African-American adults as many traditional government agencies were not sending staff into the community due to COVID-19. The result birthed a faith-based virtual health ministry. Using a faith-based virtual health ministry, church lay leaders and other professionals partnered with Master of Social Work (MSW) level social workers using a telehealth platform with technology tools to assist shut-in older adults in Washington, DC. The project uses a structured, coordinated care telehealth support model for a marginalized population. Telehealth within the rubric of healthcare models has not been demonstrated in African American communities, particularly older adults. Meeting the needs of shut-in older adults and marginalized groups within the COVID-19 pandemic may show innovation that can be translational for local governments and traditional safety net providers within a social work milieu.

Quality Improvement of Pastoral Care for Major Depression in the Community of an African American Religious Organization

Mental illness is a complex personal and social problem. In the African American community, cultural and ethnic stigma concerning mental illness often discourages this population from seeking the help they need. African Americans are more likely to rely on religious coping strategies such as prayer and/or informal trusted community social supports such as a senior pastor, members of a ministerial team who provide pastoral care in their churches, family members, and a limited number of friends. Implementation of a unique church-based initiative for depression/suicidality screening and stigma reduction, and collaborative efforts with community mental health providers, are promising steps toward optimizing diagnosis, treatment, follow-up for depression in African American persons in faith-based organizations. This project attempted to elaborate on and clarify the link between stigma, such as beliefs related to mental illness, and how education could influence and improve pastoral care by ministerial leaders for mental health issues in their congregants.

Religion, Race, and Sexuality in American Culture: A Public Conversation

Religion, Race, and Sexuality in American CultureA Public Conversation1 Victor Anderson (bio) It was indeed a very warm evening in the summer of 2010 as we gathered at Union Theological Seminary in New York City for the Arcus Conference. I was there to participate over the weekend to discuss the intersections of religion, race, and sexuality, specifically in the United States, with a large assembling of African American religion scholars and LGBGTQ activists. On the opening night I sat with two very esteemed co-panelists, talking frankly, critically, and hopefully about the ways that religion—more explicitly, the Black Church2—has been an empowering source of spirituality for many of its LGBTQ members; but also, for the most part, of its role as spiritual and moral gatekeepers over the sexualities of its members and communities. The church has used its spiritual authority to demean, distort, and demonize the longed-for and expressed same-sex loves of church members. The following conversation is adapted from transcripts of the larger conversation, which took place at Union Theological Seminary that evening. As a contribution to this celebrated issue of Palimpsest, it foregrounds what, as a scholar in African American Religious Ethics, I believe today, as I did a decade ago as a panelist, that the greatest significance of faith in the lives, practices, and hopes of LGBTQ people is its powerful witness to a love supreme: “Love is a sacred word.”3 Moderator: Good evening. I want to thank you all for coming out this evening for our public conversation on religion, race, and sexuality in American culture. It is good to see such a good turnout on this hot New York City night. . . . We want to jump right into our conversation. [End Page 26] There are so many directions that a conversation on religion, race, and sexuality could go, and rather than offering some set-up comments, I will simply pose a general question that our presenters will be invited to take any way they like: “In your scholarship, and in your life, what is it about the intersections of the categories of religion, race, and sexuality that you find most troubling, most pressing, most encouraging, or most significant as we think about moving our conversation forward?” Victor: I’m glad to be here and to see so many friends whom I haven’t seen in a long time. While waiting at the airport to fly here yesterday from Nashville, I overheard two voices behind me. As I listened to them (yeah, I was being nosy), the voices had a familiar sound that verged on stereotyping. I recognized the texture of the sounds. I knew that the two voices behind me were African Americans, and that they were young. But I also recognized another texture in their voices, one that I’ve heard many times before in the close company of other gay friends. It was the sound in their voices that gave them away. I guess my “gaydar” really got into motion there [slight laughter]; and I knew that seated behind me, also waiting for the flight, were two gay African American males. And so, I turned to look for other signs of whether my intuition was correct. I looked at their clothing, and they were dressed alike. They had on shorts that were similar and white shirts that were similar too. And I said, “Mm. That would be a kind of sign.” When they got up from their seats, I saw the way they walked. They walked pretty normally, pretty much like myself. But it had a kind of, kind of lift to it, and I said, “that might be, that might be another sign!” [audience laughs] But, when I got on the plane and the plane got quiet, I had to go to the bathroom; as I got to the bathroom, I looked over at their seats in particular, and I saw their heads on each other’s heads, and I saw them holding hands. And I said, “Wow. That’s neat.” I said to myself, “Oh, if that were only possible in the era in which I grew up. If such expressions of love...

Carol Wayne White, 'Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism'

Carol Wayne White, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American
 Religious Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 132 pp., $25.00
 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0-8232-6982-2.

“Precious Lord”: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel

Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most canonical works. Although its composition by Dorsey in the wake of his wife’s sudden death in childbirth is a widely known oral history, the cultural implications of a wider history of health care disparities in the US leading to higher rates of black maternal and infant mortality have not been seriously considered. This article studies the history of black maternal and infant mortality in Chicago during the Great Migration as it bears on the mournful sounds of the gospel blues and its gender-inflected beginnings. The history of early gospel, I argue, was profoundly influenced by black women’s sympathetic identification with the experiences of migration and mother-loss Nettie Dorsey’s death represents. While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness. As such, she stands in for an alternate history of modern gospel musicality, one helping African American religious and musical history see and hear better what Emily Lordi calls “black feminist resonance” in black musical production in the golden age of gospel.

Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism. By Carol Wayne White. New York: Fordham University Press. x + 164 pages. $25.00 (paper).

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Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, and the Racialization of Nature, or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today

Research Article| September 01 2017 Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, and the Racialization of Nature, or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today Carol Wayne White Carol Wayne White Bucknell University Carol Wayne White is professor of philosophy of religion at Bucknell University, and the author of Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions (2002); The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631–70): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism (2009); and Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (2016). She has recently published articles addressing the intersections of religious naturalism and queer theory, ecology and religion, and critical race theory and naturalistic views of the human. White is currently working on two new book projects. One explores the tenets of deep ecology and religious naturalism that are expressed in contemporary American nature poets and writers; the other addresses the problematic connections between antiblack racism and speciesism using the tenets of religious naturalism. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Journal of Theology & Philosophy (2017) 38 (2-3): 109–122. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjtheophil.38.2-3.0109 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Carol Wayne White; Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, and the Racialization of Nature, or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today. American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 1 January 2017; 38 (2-3): 109–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjtheophil.38.2-3.0109 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Journal of Theology & Philosophy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review of the book Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism, C. Wayne White, 2016

Review of the book Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism, C. Wayne White, 2016

Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism. By Carol Wayne White. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016. 164 Pages. US $25.00 (Softcover).

<i>Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism</i>. By Carol Wayne White. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016. 164 Pages. US $25.00 (Softcover).

Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism

Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism

Book Review: Julius H. Bailey. Down in the Valley: An Introduction to African American Religious History

Book Review: Julius H. Bailey. <i>Down in the Valley: An Introduction to African American Religious History</i>

African American Religious Community's Involvement with HIV/AIDS Education

This project assessed the involvement of the African American religious community in African American HIV/AIDS prevention. Participants of the study were 9 African American church ministers or pastors and 8 churchgoers. They participated in a 30 minute interview to answer questions regarding their churches' involvement in HIV/AIDS education. As a result, we found that the community's involvement in HIV/AIDS education is limited to abstinence preaching. We also found that stigma related to the disease is one of the obstacles that prevent the church to diversify HIV/AIDS educational programs. The disease is stigmatized because it involves sex, homosexuality and drug use. Contrary to previous authors who have written that condom is a taboo subject in the church community we found that church members can openly discuss condom only for the use by married couples. We hope that future planning and implementation of public health programs in the African American religious community consider these findings.